Still here
by Charna Toiba
Summary: Despite it all, I am still here, still breathing, still walking, still seeing. Against all of the odds, I have survived. Even if I have lost people along the way, the galaxy still continues. Written in second person femshep with a male romance option


ut into your cocoon of silence.

Then more light begins to show through as everything is lifted off you. You still cannot hear them but you can see the look of shock on their faces to see you breathing. Carefully you are lifted out and layed down on a stretcher. He comes over to you and his mouth moves wordlessly. You cannot hear him, and you cannot speak. You choke on your own voice, unable to speak, scared of what you will (or will not) hear.

You are taken to the waiting Normandy and he follows. Someone goes to stop him but you cling to his hand keeping him with you. In a quiet world you need someone that you know. You're stretchered to Dr Chakwas and placed on a med-bay bed. She pokes and prods you, moving your arms and legs and binding your ribs that have seemingly broken. She looks sad as she stays silent despite her unquenchable urge to think aloud.

Eventually she stops and she sits by him, who has yet to leave your side since you were pulled out. Onto a pad of paper she began to write. Quickly she scrawled across the page and turned out to you. You read but cannot answer the question out loud, knowing the painful truth. You will not hear yourself talk, nor will you hear her response. Or anything.

She writes that the blast must have damaged your ears and you can remember a stabbing pain from just after you had shot the crucible. The explosion had sent your back, colliding with a collapsed wall, you hit your head and blacked out, but not before hearing white noise fill your head.

Days pass and then weeks. You don't leave the med-bay. You barely move, only to use the bathroom. After two months you are marched out of the room that has adopted you and forced up into an elevator and taken into your own room. You sit on your bed in your silence as people move around you. Someone hands you some clothes and you get dressed. The cotton top feeling smooth against your skin which will scar when the burns heal.

He comes in and sits next to you. It takes months but eventually you learn. Move-by-move step-by-step, word-by-word he teaches you it all. It takes awhile before you are hThe first breath hurts. Like thousands of needles stabbing you in the lungs. But you do it anyway. You have to live, you couldn't bare to leave him again. Even though this feeling was a weakness, you craved it. You keep breathing ignoring the pain as you cough on ash and smoke, the filters having long since waned and died. It's only the armour that is stopping your body from being crushed. Your visor begins to cloud as sleep threatens to overwhelm you- when a ray of light shines through.

A torch shining through the rubble. You attempt to call out but your voice dies in your throat. The pressure pushing down on your ribs begins to alleviate but you can't hear them moving anything. It's quiet, not quite silent, a high pitched sound- like a whistle- bounces around your ears blocking out the rescuers noise as they begin to pull rubble off you.

You can't hear him call out to you, begging you to answer him, to say anything to him, to prove that you aren't dead. That he was right. The noise in your head gets louder and it begins to hurt. You wince as it makes your head throb. Your slight movement nocks a heavy sheet of metal onto your buckled chest plate and you cannot help but to shoaving conversations not with words but with your hands. All the crew help some of them are learning to others are taken to carrying around boards for the to write on and you to read. It's takes two months of learning and being grounded on the outskirts of the ruined London but eventually you begin to feel better. You aren't scared to leave your room with the fear of not knowing what people think of you or not being able to help or be helped.

You don't get better but it's easier. You don't get used to the quiet but it's easier to cope with. You dislike having to rely on everyone else but you like to rely in him, it's made the pair of you stronger.

But then when you get called back to the citadel. Back to those who do not know, who cannot talk, and suddenly, it is impossibly hard again. You fight back tears that burn your eyes, and he takes your hand, holding it tightly in his as he pulls you away from the crowds near the docks, the reported surrounding the ship. He pulls your hood over your head, covering the flaming red mess of hair that has grown too long, falling past your shoulders- he still loves it though. Then he pushes past them, your hand still in his as he tugs you behind, the rest of the crew follows as you head back to the apartment.

It was damaged, but it wasn't repairable, it wasn't unlivable, so you stay there. He holds you each night, the crew come to visit, and you all sit on the sofa, like you had done at the party, except for EDI. It is still a struggle to look Joker in the eyes, but he says that he understands, that you had no other choice, later Tali tells you of the plan that they have to put EDI back together again, once they get the chance. You manage to give a small smile after that, a small weight lifted away from your shoulders.

It's three years later when you begin to feel like everything is getting better, and he still hasn't left your side for more than a few hours. EDI gets put together again, and you wish that you could hear her and Joker talking again, the constant jokes that made you laugh during the war. You wish you could hear Garrus go on about calibrations, Miranda and Jack arguing, Tali rapidly talking about engines and Wrex and Grunt just talking. You wish you could hear it all, but you can't.

But you are still alive, you still have him, your friends. And you are so grateful for that fact, you wouldn't change it for anything in the world.


End file.
